Please forgive me for failing to write
anymore after Wednesday. Though I did have a better view on it, I still
struggled with the “go-go-go” mentality, and I usually did journaling in the
evening (The one time I tried to do it at lunch, I never got to it because I
was going over lessons), but then it was always late, so I put it off. I did a
lot Thursday through Sunday, but it wasn’t very much new stuff.
So, another epic fail
in the journaling department. We’re on the last leg of our trip, the plane back
to Houston (I slept through the first one). I’ve been busy and/or sidetracked since Thursday, so I haven’t
recorded anything else, obviously. The rest of the trip since the safari really
hasn’t been too eventful, though. I mostly just tagged along with other people
to their meetings or just around town. I think our group found a total of five,
or maybe six, people of peace who could become leaders. This was even more than
our original hope. None of those were people I originally found, but I played a
part in our team meeting them, and then in teaching some of them lessons later
on. For example Oliver met Richard, the shop owner in Main Market, when we went
there together and I talked to the owner of the next store (when I went
looking for a hat). I know I’ve been an
important part of the team, even though that hasn’t been too obvious all of the
time. That was one lie I had been trapped with, and also the lie that I could
somehow “mess up” God’s perfect plan for the trip. But the reality is, the
truth is, that, no matter how hard it may be to accept it sometimes, God’s ways
are so much higher than ours, and we don’t see nearly everything that takes
place. I interacted with so many people, and I shared the Gospel with so many
of them, and I have no way to know what God is going to do with all of those
meetings and call and words and prayers and smiles. That’s what this is all
about. The Gospel, the Good News, so good people will go to a strange place and
eat food they don’t like and do things they don’t know how to do, just for the
chance to tell it to people who have never heard it before. Some people even go
and live in places most people wouldn’t even want to see, except maybe in a
picture that causes you to, perhaps, shed a tear and think quiet thoughts for a
while before giving a few cents just to ease your conscience, I think you could
say there are two kinds of people in this world, those who spread the Gospel,
to the ends of the earth, with the hope and promise of every person someday
knowing it, and those who don’t. There aren’t missionaries and
non-missionaries. A missionary is just someone who goes to a foreign country to
spread the Gospel. An architect is an architect whether he designs the house next
door or the high-rise on another hemisphere. And giving money to help someone
else share the Gospel is indeed advancing its progress, but it shouldn’t ease
your conscience. Rather, it should cause it to burn even more, and those quiet
thought to turn to the question, “This person is travelling to another country
just because this news is so important that it must be shared, and what have I
done to share it?” No extra reward is given to those who travel.
So then, what I hope is the biggest change in
me from this trip is how I view the Gospel. Until now, if I had asked myself
that question, the answer would be pretty near to nothing. I did a lot of
seed-sowing on this trip, and I hope to continue after getting back home.
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